The transparent slide for the brave

A building (basically a skyscraper) has made the world stop and think, ‘are we getting too bored?’

No longer do skateboards, rollercoasters or even skydives provide enough thrill to seek, instead we need it in anyway we can.

This multi-purpose building, by OUE, is treating residents and guests to a type of sky-deck that you’ve never seen or experienced before.

Unlike the Sky Pool in London, or the Sky-deck at Eureka Tower, this sky-slide shoots you out of the building’s exterior, and whips you down a slide to a softened pad at the end.

“The wonderful contradiction of the slide is that it only feels unsafe,” engineer Michael Ludvik told Slate.

“It’s built with factors of safety and levels of redundancy which would make the most conservative engineer blush.” 

Ludvik said that glass is “brittle but is strong like metal,” adding that the key to building big glass structures is “to engineer around the brittleness.” 

New oversized fabrication technologies allowed them to engineer single pieces of bent and twisted glass made with a chemical strengthening technology that renders it “as strong as structural steel,” he said. 

The structure is bolted together with components that swivel to prevent stresses at the connection points. 

The wall glass carries weight, while the roof and the floor carry wind and seismic loads. 

“A lot of the structural magic is made possible by the ability to bolt glass components together and have them carry high loads,” Ludvik said.

The 13 metre long slide is made up of 3 cm thick triple-laminated hurricane glass, and will cost a mere $8 for tourists to slide down. But, when you’re 30 metres above the ground, 3 centimetres of glass doesn’t exactly ease any worries or phobias when it comes to height. 

We’ll let you go first - tickets go on sale in LA on March 18.